There has been a tremendous growth of data and information services available to subscribers connected to the public switched telephone network such as Electronic Bulletin Boards, Electronic Data Providers, On-line Service Providers and now access to the Internet. Most of these data and information service providers (DISP's) have a limited number of access ports. This results in a high probability that a subscriber attempting to connect to these DISP's will encounter a busy condition. Accordingly, many subscribers program their customer premises equipments (CPE) to continuously redial the DISP after encountering busy until a free access port is found and a connection is made to the DISP. CPE can be programmed to dial many times a minute, representing a load on the network which is several times the engineered load. All switch hardware is engineered to handle a certain number of call attempts per minute based on traditional voice telephony based call models.
In prior art, focus has been on the controlling the number of calls routed within the network to specified destinations. In the article "Kenichi Mase, Hisao Yamamoto, Advanced Traffic Control Methods for Network Management, October 1990 IEEE Communications Magazine", two traffic control methods are described; code blocking and call gapping. Code blocking is a method used to block all calls to a specified destination. Call gapping is a method to threshold the number of calls to a specified destination. That is, the method allows for only one call to be routed to the destination during a specified time interval. Both of these traffic controls can be activated on an area code, an exchange or to a particular destination subscriber number. These traffic controls are applied within the routing network as close to the call origin as possible, preserving network capacity otherwise wasted on ineffective attempts. The contents of this reference is incorporated herein by reference.
The U.S. Pat. No. 5,524,145 in the name of A. M. Parker entitled "Incoming Call Completion Threshold Restriction" granted June 1996 and assigned to Bell Atlantic, also describes a method which has the effect of controlling the number of calls within the routing network. This reference describes a method for thresholding the number of call completions within a given time window to a particular destination in an AIN. The contents of this reference is incorporated herein by reference.
Those methods, however, although useful control call establishment toward specific destinations. This implies that repetitive dialing will still consume valuable network resources, particularity at the call routing level. Thus, there is need in the industry to develop a new method and system to control repetitive dialing, with particular emphasis on controlling the dialing as close as possible to the CPE, thus preventing or at least limiting network overloading.